For Visits to Asteroid & Mars, NASA Needs New Ways to Do Everything

Below:

Next story in Space

With NASA at a crossroads as the space shuttles retire, the space
agency is facing the steep challenge of developing a slew of new
technologies for a new phase in exploration: trips to an asteroid
and Mars.

For 30 years, NASA astronauts have worked in low-Earth orbit,
flying on the space shuttles and building the International
Space Station. Now that the station is complete and the shuttle
program is winding down, the United States is focusing on sending
astronauts farther out in the solar system than ever before.

NASA's next big goals for human spaceflight, as articulated by
President Barack Obama, are visiting an asteroid by the year 2025
and
landing on Mars in the 2030s.

"We're not going to get to an asteroid in 2025 without some of
the key building blocks that NASA wants to start on today,"
NASA's chief technologist Bobby Braun told reporters during a
June 27 teleconference.

The end of the space shuttle program this year (with the
last flight due to launch July 8 ) should free up personnel,
money and time for NASA to tackle deep-space projects.

"If you think of NASA having a certain pie, if you will, the
space shuttle program for a number of years has taken a fairly
significant piece of the pie," Braun said. "That piece of the pie
will be available for some of these other systems and
capabilities that I've been describing."

Deep space exploration

But traveling to an asteroid, and then perhaps Mars, is likely to
require technologies significantly more advanced than what we
currently use to send people to space.

"In-space propulsion: That jumps near the top of the list as one
of the technologies that we can invest in today so that that
capability exists in time for its use in sending humans to an
asteroid and Mars on the timeline that the president suggested,"
Braun said.

Other technologies on the spaceflight wish list include a
heavy-lift rocket capable of breaking free from low-Earth orbit
and traveling into deep space, and a spacecraft that can
withstand the journey there and back.

NASA recently announced its plan to develop the " Multi-Purpose
Crew Vehicle " (MPCV) to serve as the capsule for these trips,
to be lofted by the "Space Launch System" (SLS), a heavy-lift
rocket that NASA is also building. Both are expected to be ready
by 2016, though that goal might be hard to meet, given that the
design for the SLS has not yet been decided.

Landing systems will have to be designed to touch down given the
lower gravity of Mars and the even lower gravity of an asteroid.
Once they touch down, astronauts will need technologies that
enable to them to make water, construct habitats, even generate
rocket fuel from the resources they find.

And better communications systems are a must.

"Let's face it: We're all going to want to see the high-def
video," Braun said of a
human mission to deep space. "We're going to want to talk to
the astronauts significantly more than we do to robotic probes."

Such ambitious missions won't involve just new technologies, but
new breakthroughs in science.

"There is science to be done at these places and in advance to
arriving at some of these," said NASA chief scientist Waleed
Abdalati. "When we talk about going to Mars, the moon and an
asteroid, there are clues to the origin of the solar system,
important clues that, when we can get to these and retrieve
pieces of these and we can analyze them in situ or bring
some of these back and analyze here, we can understand how the
solar system evolved, how the Earth evolved, our place in the
solar system and the universe.

"Science and technology really go hand in hand. The technology
enables exploration and science. The science and exploration
needs drive the technology we need to develop."